A
genuine eye-witness account of shootings
of Jews on the Eastern Front

GERMAN ARMY
engineer-colonel Walter Bruns
was stationed near Riga in November
1941, when he witnessed a mass shooting of
Jews, including a thousand just arrived
from Berlin.

In British captivity in April 1945,
Bruns, by then a Major-General, was
overheard by hidden microphones [the
verbatim transcripts are accessible from
our Index at right]
whispering to fellow prisoners what he had
seen.

There is no question whatever about the
authenticity of these files, which
("Holocaust denier") David Irving
was the first to find and use them in his
works on Hitler
(1977, 1991), Goering (1987), Goebbels
(1996), and the Nuremberg
Trial (1997). He has also read them
out to scores of audiences around the
world and drawn the attention of Holocaust
historians like Gerald Fleming
to them.

From the general's description of the
dimension of the pits, they could have
held perhaps one to two thousand victims
each. This gives a dimension to this
particular atrocity.

What is interesting is Hitler's distant
role in this. Bruns talks vaguely of a
"Führer order," but does not describe
it. In fact when his superiors complained
about the atrocity to Hitler's
headquarters (see final paragraphs) the
order came from there to halt such mass
executions immediately.

The documents can be found in the
Public Record Office, London, as file
number WO.208/4169.

What General Walter
Bruns said in 1945 (when he thought we
weren't listening):

Revisionists must
not make the mistake of claiming, crudely
speaking, that no bodily harm whatever
came to the Jews during the Third Reich.
But nor should their opponents allege
that Germans alone were the perpetrators.
Or (as the Israelis
claimed in June
1987) that
the Bruns document "proves" Hitler's
direct involvement.

We shall reproduce
here over the next weeks several documents
indicative of atrocities which did
occur (and we draw attention to the
British intercepts, already posted, of
SS
unit code messages
from the Eastern Front).
What
seems important is an assessment of the
scale of the atrocities, and the degree to
which they were ad hoc (like My
Lai) or institutionalised massacres (like
Hiroshima, Dresden, Lidice).